As those of you on Discord probably know, we've been working toward changing up parts of ASB and, in the long run, hopefully restoring activity around these parts. You would also know that everyone seems to have their own idea of how this should happen.

The goal of this thread is to make sure everyone has a place where their voice can be heard. Anyone in ASB with a Proposal can post a link to it here, and it will be added to the OP of the thread with its own section. Anyone in ASB can also share their thoughts on posted proposals, and suggestions for those proposals will be added to that proposal's section in a "suggestions" subsection.

Do note, all of this ultimately falls to the LO team to make final decisions on. Just because a proposal has lots of support in the community doesn't mean it will by default be enacted. We take the community's opinion seriously, but this is not a democracy- we have a team of officials for a reason, and that reason is to run and lead the game.

Also note, just because I'm an LO and wrote my proposal entirely doesn't mean that it carries any more weight than anyone else's. It doesn't even mean that it's a very good proposal, it just means I'm the guy who wrote it. It's far from an "official" proposal- if it was that it'd be sitting in the LO Forum- and I encourage anyone and everyone who's in the ASB or interested in joining/rejoining a revamped ASB to put their two cents out their, be it by giving opinions on existing proposals or crafting your own! This also goes for any suggestions or proposals put forth by other LOs unless otherwise stated.

Suggestions:
-Loosen restrictions on Type Changes
-Separate Level Purchases and 'Mon Purchases
-Use a points allocation system rather than a proper spending system for Pokemon
-Don't add incentive for longer Reffings
-Strictly enforce ref DQ system
-Slots being harder to purchase (supposed to be in there I just forgot it but yeah)

I'm of the belief that TLs in their current form are far to restrictive and inherently flawed in that people are going to have their favorite pokemon and it arguably degrades their ability to enjoy the game if a significant portion of the pokemon they love are locked behind heavy prerequisites.

Suggestion, do away with prereqs, if Johny Joe Noob wants his favorite mon Ninetales he should be able to access to it, a game is for fun let the lad have fun. Now I recognize just letting everyone that walks through the door run around with a Snorlax would probably trigger a number of people here but a somewhat popular idea that's floated around on the Discord has been having something of a points system where a Trainer has X amount of points and the point cost of their complete squad can not exceed that number of points.

Given proper balance this would allow everyone to have some of their favorites while still making sure a fresh of the boat player can't just line their squad with top of the line pokemon and even gives a trade off if they try to do so in part.

As I alluded to earlier I don't like TLs as a concept and think we should just ax them. Instead of using them I simply suggest that the system I mentioned in the above section have things set up to where battling and perhaps reffing can help increase the points one can have for the purpose of pokemon additions and evolutions.

Lets have the points be our current TP, given at the end of each match regardless of win or loss so people don't get into ruts and lose motivation. Maybe let people buy decent amounts of TP with their SP? Regardless that's something I'll go into more in a later section.

I'm sure most of those that have been around me know I'm not a fan of direction we've taken with them. Throughout most of my time here sigs have been a way for Trainers to express their creativity, create unique tools, expand on the minor bits of RP that exist here and just in general have fun.

As I hope I've gotten across in my first section I want people to be able to use their favorite pokemon regardless of where they're at and part of this is being able to excuse using them once they actually get them, to make it short I want people to be able to sig their Eevee to be as good as Snorlax albeit in its own way. Why must some pokemon be blatantly better than others when one of the major strengths of PASBL is the freedom from moveset restriction and stat totals the game provides?

As a note for the above, perhaps have sigs on a pokemon contribute to its cost to a team, that way an Eevee as strong as a Snorlax still takes up as many of your options as an actual Snorlax.

Honestly fine with how it works right now for the most part, I do think the conversion to TP should be greater than it is though. I'd also suggest good behavior as a battler be rewarded somewhat with some SP or SP gain boosts.

Just keep them the way they are now but do evaluations more often and perhaps open a court similar to the old Sig Court where people can submit matches where refs are being shitty for more immediate and personal punishment. Could also use such a court to give people better grades!

Take control out of the involved parties hands, make them fully automatic and shut down attempts to ignore the rule. Limit TAs to have a short cool down between instances where they are established and put a limit to how long they can go on for. We don't want to excuse people going away for months and we don't want to let them do it by chaining close proximity TAs.

Do them more often, make them kind of radiate instead of going forward, by this I mean allow refs that just finished shit up right before them to recieve retroactive benefit from SP modifiers. Alternatively or additionally maybe just auto grant the event token to those who have done X amount of reffings within a time span.

Give us a social media presence already, see if anyone in the community is willing to upkeep and do the right kinds of spam, hell maybe decide on a list of people to do it so no one person gets overwhelmed.

I believe in a PASBL where anyone can use anything, both in acquisition and in actual practical in battle use regardless of how long they've been here or what they end up facing. I believe this can be achieved with a points based rework of our acquisition system and a do away with TLs as well as laxer sig rules. Let's make the highest denominator of pokemon the balance point instead of the middle ground, nothing can be overpowered if everything is.

The inner workings of PASBL need to be able to run smoother, let the best of us help lessen the burdens of the LOs by taking care of mundane things like HPs, Items and other stuff just needs a green stamp (sigs aside of course). More events, make it easier for our active refs to benefit from them.

Reward battlers for good behavior and be unforgiving to those that exhibit bad ones by having an extremely strict DQ system.

Make ASB more about fun than anything else, no point in a fine tuned machine if no one wants to use it.

Not a huge fan of the league table shit, but the reffing challenge system definitely feels like it should be a thing. Irritating battlers questioning every single last thing that didn't go their way is a huge motivation killer.

Basically the one issue I want to see addressed is losers still getting KOs. This irked me to no end when I was still playing, because let's face it, most ordinary matches are won by a 1-mon margin and essentially whoever sends out their last mon first is completely and utterly shafted as they lose and then get paltry TP for the match and nothing else. If TLs are gated behind KOs and TP both, then both parties in a match need to receive both, because otherwise, there is no incentive for people who find themselves to be less skilled to stick around-it's near on impossible for them to progress. Getting full KO's and double TP should be incentive enough to win, there is no need to give the loser the shaft. I like Iron'S proposal a little for this reason.

244) While not FORBIDDEN, my Midnight is to keep in mind that using an army of animated skeletons in order to fill the town square with a rendition of "Spooky Scary Skeletons" is going to be considered odd at best.

Okay so there's things I like and things I don't about this- The system for actually getting mon is nice, and from what I understand not too different from what I had??? If it is then I'm misreading so please correct me!

I'm sort of concerned about the movepool restrictions, though. While in theory it definitely helps with the issues we have with move oceans breaking the game, in practice I think it would make for some serious issues, especially if the base was as low as 10 moves. If we don't adopt the Reed System globally (which I think would be ideal but I'm not sure newbies could grasp easily), getting a bunch of offtype becomes extremely dangerous because your 'mon can end up just getting stuck with struggle or something if you're out of offtype (or, worse, your only moves left are ones the opponent resists/is immune to) because they tormented or imprisoned your STAB(s). In theory just spending three or four slots on STAB/Normal doesnt sound ridiculous but it gets much more so when you're reminded that thats anywhere between 40% and 20% of your entire movepool at the start, and you're left with as little as 6 moves for... literally everything else- offtype, defensive tools, you name it. If we're gonna limit movepools, I think all pokemon should have access to their entire level up pool (maybe their Egg pool too) and then you can spend whatever points we use to purchase TM/MT/Event moves, potentially at varying premiums so as to create an incentive to not just getting EQ and Ice Beam on everything. Oh, and one other concern I have here is this would take lots of tracking and I don't want ASB to become Links Inc. like FB was and if you have 15 links to buying moves on every mon thats kind of exactly what it is.

Also, I think TLs should still exist because they're useful for sorting the skill of trainers in a way less arbitrary than picking a couple thresholds on the League Table, and can be used to potentially gate off stuff that shouldn't be in the hands of newbies who don't fully understand the game (Lookin' at you Sigs)

I like this, but Alto's set up a Glicko system we could use for a league table in the future. I'm not a maths guy so I'm not gonna weigh in on the pros and cons of them related to each other, I'll let people more qualified do that. I just figured I'd make that public knowledge for consideration.

Good stuff there, especially with the challenge system. I would recommend that the number of challenges get increased for high level matches ex: Gym/E4 (maybe scenarios??) because when there's serious weight in a match I think battlers are well within their rights to make sure everything is as accurate as possible.

I'd love to see a world where reffing is fun. That was kind of my goal with adding incentive for creativity/length in reffing, but people are afraid that's gonna cause Schaden style reffings. My thing is, if it makes reffing less of a chore for people to be able to RP it or pretty it up or what have you, why would we not encourage that? I think if a battler is seriously irked by having to read a long reffing of simple orders that much then they're the problem. Its not endorsing quantity over quality- WF and FB have length requirements/incentives for length, and there's perfectly high quality stuff there.

Glicko being a more established professionally designed system is probably a better measure of skill than my rather off the cuff proposals. My two worries with it would be that a) I'm a fan of designing things that are as easy to intuitively understand as possible and b) accounting for inactivity. I'm of the opinion that being minimally active/entirely inactive should cause you to fall down the rankings pretty fast. If we can accommodate that within Glicko than I'm on board.

The squad acquisition proposals are similar to yours, yeah, I just made it so that things were entirely ungated - I'm happy for newbies to have anything they want off the bat as long as a) its somehow balanced by restricting their other options and b) we address the moveocean problem. I quite like your idea of letting them have all level up moves and they pay for TM/Tutor/Egg stuff, so long as there's some sort of cap somewhere on either the total number of moves or total number of paid moves. As for becoming links inc.. I mean, we've always operated levels/evo on trust, I think that works particularly if you keep it as simple as "spend X extra points to expand its movepool by Y total moves, with *insert cap on total number of moves here* and have movepool changes rubberstamped a la hidden power.

Also worth considering whether we want to redesign how we do offtype energy.

Reffing challenges upping for more important matches can potentially be a solid idea but I worry about it pushing refs away from wanting to ref those kind of matches - I'd have thought gating through ref grade was a good enough ensurance but *shrug*.

Thoughts on Snorby's Stuff: I'll start with my main point of disagreement; TL. TL is imo a crappy way of gating things because it's no measure of skill. It's a measure of experience, to an extent, which has some mild correlation with skill, but there's very little stopping crappy trainers getting to high TLs (excepting badge requirements which have their own issues with relying on GL activity). I'd have thought we could gate things in other ways. Sigs could be as simple as five completed battles. GLs shouldn't be allowed to send anyone who already has a badge through their GT. Hoinestly Glicko to my understanding produces a number which we could use to gate things. Legends gate themselves naturally by being hard to beat and the better ones being even harder.

Like I said my pokemon acquisition proposals are similar to yours except I've ungated more heavily. Never saw the benefit of gating acquisitions, but when the league was active getting rid of it would've caused such an uproar it'd have been more trouble than it was worth. League's basically dead anyway so might as well rip this kind of thing out while we can.

The main difference for me is allowing varying squad sizes (as long as it's at least six) to compensate for getting better stuff at the start. The better your squad, the smaller and therefore more predictable and easy to counterplan it is. I'm happy just giving people a chunk of whatever we call the points when they join and letting them spend it on their squad and mega tokens as they please, as long as they have at least six mon. On that subject, we don't really need three types of points (KOs, TP and SP). If we go with a glicko system or something similar then you only need one type of points/currency to spend on shit.

Looking through your E4 proposals, I like them but think they're potentially a bit strict particularly given the turn around time for approving a new E4 arena/squad. I'd say rather than immediately kicking anyone who falls outside the top four in the rankings we should give some leeway here, keep the spot as long as you don't rank outside the top five/ten two months in a row. People have a bad patch sometimes.

I'm generally against being able to buy battle advantages through reffing rewards. Expanding/evolving your squad and acquiring mega tokens I can get behind, the other stuff not so much.

Thoughts on IT's Stuff: Requiring pokemon to actively participate in order to evolve is something I've always wanted to do but stuff like Magikarp and Caterpie makes it really hard to implement in a fair way. One potential balance is to make it so that using it in battle reduces the cost to evolve (every time it's actively used it counts as having had X points spent towards its next evo?)

Thoughts on IT's Stuff: Requiring pokemon to actively participate in order to evolve is something I've always wanted to do but stuff like Magikarp and Caterpie makes it really hard to implement in a fair way. One potential balance is to make it so that using it in battle reduces the cost to evolve (every time it's actively used it counts as having had X points spent towards its next evo?)

Honestly they were a factor in my saying that passive squadding allows for slower level gain which iirc is still in the proposal (think it's officially listed as something along the lines of 'being squadded allows for slower gains towards levels' or something) but it's definitely something that'd need working on. I'm currently editing my proposal with some new ideas that should sort this. It's also a whole new kettle of fish to boil and I've inevitably fucked stuff up, so any thoughts on the edits would be appreciated.

@Snorby: I mean right now the incentive is "getting any of the points that actually mean shit" so maybe possibly somehow that ought to be revamped? Like basically my sole gripe is the complete inability to progress if one loses, especially given the margin by which most matches are won. You can give an incentive to win without completely shafting the loser. It's not like the games actively strip you of any exp you earned in a losing battle.

244) While not FORBIDDEN, my Midnight is to keep in mind that using an army of animated skeletons in order to fill the town square with a rendition of "Spooky Scary Skeletons" is going to be considered odd at best.

I'm going to throw in a quick second that limiting movepools is going to be both a lot to keep track of and potentially extremely restrictive. A lot of the more situational moves would become very expensive to carry when you could just as easily instead grab a move more widely applicable. I see this as potentially making battling in ASB very boring.

On Glicko: I could modify the constants however I need to in order to account for inactivity in an appropriate manner.

On Ref challenging: I'm on the fence here. Frankly put, if I could only make a small number of challenges during a match, I would be much less inclined to actually hand off a standard match to a newer ref, and instead favor handpicking them from a smaller subset of "trusted" refs. (I already do this to an extent, and I know I'm not the only one). This is a case where I value battler "safety" a lot more than I value ref comfort. If a battler is being argumentative for little to no reason, it can and should be handled by the administration, but I feel that battlers should always be free to question the round.

We really should try to do a mentorship program as far as reffings go, where a more experienced member oversees some matches that a new ref takes and offers continual feedback, but that's a different discussion.

EDIT the first: Jesus this turned out to be a much longer post than I meant it to I'm sorry. Tl;dr version, do we at least agree on what issues we're trying to fix? Because that seems like a thing we should agree on if we're to have any chance of actually addressing them.

So in my mind we have a few systemic issues that need to be addressed if any revamp is going to be worth doing. I'm very much open to other peoples approaches on how to deal with them - mine definitely have flaws! - but I'd take an imperfect idea that goes some way to dealing with it over just leaving them as is any day of the week, because leaving them as is has lead to where we are now. Less than ten matches have had a post in them (across both forums) in two months.

This is mostly just a case of getting off our arses and codifying shit properly in a place where it can be easily kept up to date, and massively clamping down on how much we edit swathes of mostly irrelevant things.

Battling is boring because move oceans overcentralise around certain mon and turn the game into a typespam fest

Basically, why take a mon that can do a cool unconventional thing well if you can take something that can do it well and typespam eveything to kingdom come? How we deal with this is certainly up for debate and I share your concerns that a good number of battlers are just boring people and would build out their mon to be typespam machines if movepools were restricted. My hope is that people of mindsets like myself, Emi, Sneaze, App, Slash etc would double down on our success with less conventional ideas and - by forcing more focussed movesets on them - we might see an increase in usage of niche moves as people like that restrict the more boring options away from themselves a bit more. In turn I'm hoping that seeing some vets thrive with these kind of builds might encourage more newbies to try them out. As for keeping track of them; yeah, some saddo's might be so desperate to win that they cheat the system but it's just a larger version of hidden power and I'm comfortable operating both on trust. I don't forsee it being an endemic problem. Other peoples opinions might vary, which is fair enough.

Part of this is people learning how things work which there's a limited amount we can do to speed up - although the aforementioned killing of muyonese whispers would help cut down the skill growth time a lot. Beyond that, this is why I favour ungating 'mon acquisitions as long as it goes hand in hand with other restrictions to stop things getting silly (ie curtailing moveoceans and/or introducing some kind of points system so while you can start with that cool thing you really want, you can't just have a full squad of uber stuff).

Historically we tried to address this by making SP better and hefting out tons of it for reffing quickly but quite obviously this hasn't worked in the long run because no-one's reffing. Doing more of the same strikes me as a bit silly. I share your concerns that I'd like to err on the side of battler "safety" more then ref comfort, but again; that's what we've done up until now and it's a major contributor to having driven ASB into the ground. One of the things you hear a lot from new refs (back when we had any - it's an issue I heard a lot of back when I was running ref school) is that they're too worried about getting things wrong to actually ref. Now part of that can certainly be addressed by codifying things better and teaching new refs better so that they feel more confident with what they're doing, but I'm personally of the opinion that that's not enough. In a choice between not having refs and having vets suck it up a bit and let small mistakes slide to focus on challenging bigger issues I'd take the latter. It also lends itself to a natural learming curve for refs; people will always use their challenges let's be honest, and they'll learn to keep them for the refs biggest errors so refs will pick up their biggest issues first and progressively be picked up on less important things as they address the big'uns, rather than being overwhelmed by being picked up on every minor thing in their first handful of matches and being put off for life.

It's also why I'd favour letting better refs do cool stuff like run small GMs, mini-tournaments, exhibitions etc; it's stuff that people want to do that relies more on their reffing/organisational ability than their battling prowess so I'd be inclined to say that if they're good enough to do it without breaking anything too badly then yeah sure kid go ahead.

Stuff changing too frequently and too much pushes out vets which in turn makes the league look less active and less attractive to newbies

This is the reason I was generally against tinkering with any but the biggest problems when I was an LO but now favour route-and-stem reforms; with the league already pretty much dead there's not much damage we can do with sweeping rewrites and potentially a lot to be gained by engaging the community and addressing all these little niggles all at once. Once it's done though, the rewrite parties need to end. They're a recipe for generating widespread fatigue as people get bored of trying to remember exactly how ice beam works this week just for the sake of fixing a tiny little problem that was some vets pet peeve. Sure some stuff needed fixing - old!Bide comes to mind - but if a rewrite isn't fixing a problem you're seeing in ~25%+ of matches then it's not worth doing unless the league's already dead.

Again how we address these problems is definitely open for debate, but I'm definitely of the opinion that an imperfect solution is miles better than the status quo.

>Heather
You know some of these proposals don't even have KOs or TLs in them, right? In fact, most of them don't have KOs.

>Concept's Acquisitions vs Mine
Yeah honestly that's fair I'd be fine with no gating and it makes squad size more valuable in a less artificial way than what I was trying to do. That said I think we need to look at the pros and cons of a purchasing system vs a point allocation system. I can see the merits of both and I'd love to hear opinions.

>TLs
'Cept's right that experience can be gauged through number of battles and TL is an imperfect measurement. Though I still do have some worries about removing them. One big reason we lose vets is they feel like they've run out of things to accomplish when they're at the end of the TL system- they've got their gym, they have a badge or two, they've gotten better than almost everybody, they're at TL6-7, they've got a legendary or two, what's left to do? When this is so prevalent I'm not sure I'm comfortable with removing the TL system because that's just one less thing to progress on.

>Movepool restrictions
I think we could pretty easily offset the concern of making ASB "boring" to play in with everybody just spamming the best moves by, like I suggested, making the best moves cost more. Sure, you can get Thunderbolt for let's say 5 Points (making up numbers for the sake of argument they aren't the actual values) but if you could also get something like Wild Charge for 3 or Shock Wave for 2 many people would maybe want to stick with Wild Charge and pocket the 2 Points leftover they would've spent on Thunderbolt to go towards an evolution.

I think it's also helped by giving 'mon their full level up pool, and I think it actually will increase diversity in that respect because it makes 'mon with cool level up pools valuable- for example Machamp is better than Conkeldurr on paper but Conkeldurr gets Rock moves through level up, meaning you have to spend less points to get a strong build going. Any dullness that comes from people wanting the same few moves on their mon would, I think, be outweighed by more variety in 'mon choices and moreover counteracted by pricing the best moves higher than the rest.

> Ref Challenging
Honestly, I value Battler safety... when the battle matters. Which is why I want more challenges on important matches- sure it might make new refs squeamish about picking them up, but honestly I feel like in important matches you should only be reffing if you're confident enough in your abilities to handle an extra two or three complaints. I'm all for making refs comfortable, but I don't want to see somebody dicked out of a Gym Badge because they ran out of complaints and their referee made a mistake.

This said... sorry, but I just don't think a basic 3v3 match is gonna make-or-break your life in ASB. There's no need to emphasize battler safety there, because they really dont have that much to lose. At WORST you'll fall down one peg on trainer ranking a miss out on a couple KOs. That's far from the end of the world, especially if we offer a grace period for E4 members to get back into the top X and keep their position.

>Down with Rewrite parties
Ehh... honestly they've not been that common as of late (meaning when ASB was still active), and just because you aren't seeing a problem all the time doesn't make it less egregious, especially in the case of a move that just... is bad, or not working the way it's intended.

If we wanted to limit them to 2-4 a year I'd be fine with that but ultimately I think they serve to make the game better way more than they confuse the playerbase.

I mean, KOs or no KOs or call a KO a Smeerp, I really don't care. What I care about is the loser of a match not being robbed of what they need to progress. Sure, give them more for winning as you very well ought to, but at the end of the day you're not gonna motivate people to battle above their skill level at all if the only way you're getting anything out of it is winning, which is substantially more likely against people of lower skill level. Why put the time and effort into a 4v4 with someone more skilled when they'll likely just beat you by one mon and the however long you spent with that match is essentially just time wasted? At the end of the day, if you need X amount of Smeerps for some arbitrary means of progression, be it evolving or getting moves or TLs as we know them or whatever, the loser of a given match really should only be getting 0 Smeerps if they lose like a 1v1, if anything, to prevent grinding 1v1s for very slow point gain.

244) While not FORBIDDEN, my Midnight is to keep in mind that using an army of animated skeletons in order to fill the town square with a rendition of "Spooky Scary Skeletons" is going to be considered odd at best.

I'm sorry but it really feels like you haven't read these proposals. KO's don't exist in either, and no, there's new version of a KO renamed something else- why would we ever do that? That's just a waste of time. In both my and Concept's proposals the loser gets the things needed to gather mon (and in mine, TL up). And mine has a system built in that rewards players for battling above their skill level, even if they lose and especially if they win.

Heather can I suggest you stop making everything you say seem like it's framed from a point of view where you are either coming across as aggressive or are seemingly trying to make the other party sound like they understand nothing and you are far more intelligent. It comes off as incredibly condescending and is never going to get your point heard in a proper fashion.

re: Concept changes. Agree wholeheartedly with the vast number of these. Prefer his system of acquisition to Snorby's, essentially just a more refined version which is nice.

Agree to some extent that limiting movepools to an extent could help make things more interesting - Snorby's example of Machamp vs. Conk is a good one - but would also warn to practice caution here. Maybe run a trial period or two. This could very quickly become too much to handle and could be consequentially confusing to any possible new blood (which should remain our focus when it comes to redesigning the League).

Likewise (surprisingly) agree with gripes regarding rewrite parties. I understand their inherent usefulness having done quite a few regarding SCs myself, but if we are going to fully commit here we should as a community be able to wrangle out most of the little idiocies here and make it so that things don't really need as much tinkering going forwards. Don't abolish them completely - as stated, they have use - but limiting them like Snorby suggested may be a smart move. This also gives people involved in the process more time to discuss at length and over time - opinions and minds change, and this can only ever be healthy.

re: accomplishments, Alto's suggestions of implementing 'post game' as it were is an okay idea, but how we do it is the crux of the issue. Spitballing we could implement some sort of 'prestige' system which gives some sort of award where the award is basically bragging rights, but that would be the only soggy idea stuck on my wall at the moment. This is an important thing, but less important than attracting new blood.

with regards to referee challenging, implement them primarily for the most important of matches. make it so that both challengers and referees can agree to implement the challenge system for anything else. you want to prove your bollocks in a 4 vs. 4 showdown with someone good, but want to give a bone to a newer referee and help them out here and there? ask for the challenge system to be implemented, make it clear you will offer constructive criticism whenever you challenge, and make it absolutely clear that LOs and moderation at large will not take kindly to someone who disrespects referees and continues to engender the culture of newbies being worried. how discipline is implemented is obviously up to the leadership but I was always a fan of Kush's ideas of barring problem members from roles of authority (GLship etc) until they can prove they are no longer being a problem.

So the basic principle here is similar to my and 'Cept's proposals, except it's probably the most conservative on allowing newbies to get strong mon, where 'Cept's is the most loose and mine is some sort of middle ground (probably a little closer to 'Cept's than this)

It's also point allocation rather than purchase, which in theory I like, but it does bring about serious, serious problems that I think need to be addressed before we fully sign on with such a system. That big problem is drops/adds. You made very clear that there's no AP penalty for changes to your squad. I'm... not sure I'm okay with that. It makes squad slots pretty meaningless beyond "this is the number of mons you can have with signatures at a time". If you're okay with going in sigless, you pick up six extra rock types you'd normally never even think about right before you knock at the fire gym's door, then turn around and drop them for six dark types on your way to the Psychic Gym. Hell, you can even have a Gallade for the Steel gym, then devolve it and re-evolve it into Gardevoir and go knocking at the Dragon gym. You don't even lose your sig there under the current rules! This is bound to get out of hand really fast and make gym and badges pretty meaningless if not completely addressed.

As I understand it, this is basically a consolidation of TLs and a nixing of squad slots in favor of AP. TL1s will have access to 1-3, TL2s 4-5, and TL3s 6-7, at least speaking in very broad terms. My worry here is that, as we've seen in practice with other people before, TL3 can take a proverbial fuckload of time to get to, even if you're active, unless you're naturally good at the game- which not everyone is and while this is a competitive league I really don't want to make it so you have to have natural talent to get the mon you want in a relatively timely fashion.

Everything looks good here, though part of me wants to at some point down the line take my own crack at making contests a more common and accessible thing so I'd rather not see them locked off to later TLs. Would the amount of AP you get for TLing up be static throughout TLs or change from level to level?

Definitely gonna disagree with you here on some things. The biggest one is that stronger mons should still be allowed to keep their current (and let's be real objectively pretty strong) sigs. I think there's definitely a massive range between giving your Dragonite a sig that makes it 2x weak to ice or my really good Gengar sig and sigs so bad that they aren't even worth putting on. I'd like to hit that range, ideally. Go ahead and give your Dragonite access to Gunk Shot and Sludge Bomb if you'd like but if you want a type chart change you better be sigging a Noivern.

The bigger picture, though, is that there's just so many things that if we change the mechanic all the sigs that go with it need to be dumped, so we'll at LEAST need to do wipes of certain kinds of sigs- for example if we change how offtype works we'll probably need to reevaluate sigs that grant new offtype (Which is a LOOOOOT of fuckin sigs). This is especially so if we switch to Reed because so many cap themselves at 2 uses or whatever and that's not how it would work anymore.

That said, any sigs we end up deciding don't need to be wiped (Be that because I'm overruled on the change to sig policy or we just don't change stuff that necessitates partial wipes) are more than welcome to be dropped in an icebox. If we're wiping some but not all I imagine Sneaze or I would run through each iceboxed post and make sure they don't fall into a wiped category but that's not too hard.

Like this stuff, though I don't think sporadic updates are feasible. Community feedback plays a large role in the current Eval system so the most we could really do is look at how many times a ref has been DQ'd and change their reliability accordingly.

This stuff seems alright in theory, and I really do like the ref DQ plan. However, I tend to worry that the GL/GT stuff and the general battler stuff is awfully similar to what we have now that clearly doesn't work. As such I prefer my own GL DQ system and for regular battlers I think we should consider something along the lines of strikes in a match. Let's use the week hard deadline for the sake of argument. If Battler A exceeds the deadline, their orders are locked in as "Stand and do nothing". Battler B may then order as they please. Battler A receives a strike. Battler A is automatically disqualified after three strikes (roughly half a matchup). This means that if a match just slips your mind or you get super busy for a week, you don't lose outright, but it still provides incentive for people to stay on top of their matches and allows for DQs when someone is consistently inactive.

This is an idea worth considering but not something I'm immediately sold on. If we were to do this I would want to do a trial run with it- maybe do a few practice matches, then if those go well try it out league-wide for anyone who wants to participate in the trial for a month or two, then implement it if we like the changes it brings about.

I'd love to see your tournament system put into place but that's something for way down the line that we can't even begin to set up anytime soon. With regards to legends yeah the queue should move faster but I'm not sure what we can do in terms of policy to speed it up. Vets order slow, and DQ'ing isn't an option with the amount of SP spent on these things.

Looks fine, though I'd like to hear your suggestions for other factors beside ranking for consideration with E4 members, since I'm guessing its not GLship/Activity as I already brought those up in my initial proposal for that.

Here is the link to my proposal.
I haven't kept up with the thread too much but I wanted to put my two cents in. I'm free to answer any questions about how things would work and while I know I don't have a ton of specific details I hope my general ideas might get across and maybe even work in conjunction with someone else's proposal as well.

So in so far as your proposal goes Biggles, your first point (a shift to pure numbers) realistically more or less already exists for the most part. We already have numerical value associated with certain damage terms, and it's not uncommon for less practiced referees to simply use a strict number system when it comes to refereeing - if anything, they are encouraged to use numbers so that they can begin to get a grasp on things. There are a few vocal voices who shout about no mAthSB but even they concede that numbers exist to some extent. I do agree wholeheartedly that we need to do more to help fledgling referees though, and I am sure people will be open to any suggestions regarding that matter - but a shift to replacing all our damage terms with simple numbers will probably not accomplish much other than making our descriptions awkward to read, or robbing ASB of some of the little quirks it can have.

I like your second idea from the viewpoint of coming to pure basics and trying to distill ASB into a more compact form but I honestly don't see there being much viability in it. It's a fine concept from the point of view of trying to find some sort of ground zero to begin working from, but as a functioning ASB I feel like this only really sets us back when it comes to progression. It means people can cut and change Pokemon with an even more damaging ease (enabling a scenario like Snorby outlined where trainers constantly swap teams out to counter Gym Leaders), and while the incentive of gaining a Sig is certainly nice, the fact that this loophole exists to be easily exploited really sours me on the idea of it.

At the end of the day, if you need X amount of Smeerps for some arbitrary means of progression, be it evolving or getting moves or TLs as we know them or whatever, the loser of a given match really should only be getting 0 Smeerps if they lose like a 1v1, if anything, to prevent grinding 1v1s for very slow point gain.

244) While not FORBIDDEN, my Midnight is to keep in mind that using an army of animated skeletons in order to fill the town square with a rendition of "Spooky Scary Skeletons" is going to be considered odd at best.

Heather can I suggest you stop making everything you say seem like it's framed from a point of view where you are either coming across as aggressive or are seemingly trying to make the other party sound like they understand nothing and you are far more intelligent. It comes off as incredibly condescending and is never going to get your point heard in a proper fashion.

Okay, fine, I'll admit I was frustrated, but I really don't see what's so hard to get about "hey when we write our proposals can we at least make sure that you don't get basically nothing towards progression when losing a match of any remote substance." Like, I mentioned KOs because that's how the system works at present and figured that would be a way to get across what I was saying (and at the time was unaware that people were thinking of nixing KOs entirely, especially since Iron's proposal, the first I read, wasn't necessarily about that life at least at the time, which is why my posts later on turned to "whatever the system is, just don't fuck over the loser" ("I mean, KOs or no KOs or call a KO a Smeerp, I really don't care. What I care about is the loser of a match not being robbed of what they need to progress.")), so when I get Snorby over and over basically saying "what are you even saying" essentially because of some semantic when the point is still right there, it honestly feels like my posts aren't even being read in full.

EDIT: Going back over things, it probably didn't help that one of Snorby's posts implied I hadn't read (at the time) either of the proposals when my first post in this thread literally ended with "I like Iron's proposal for this reason." (aka Iron's proposal addresses this issue and I like it for that reason)

244) While not FORBIDDEN, my Midnight is to keep in mind that using an army of animated skeletons in order to fill the town square with a rendition of "Spooky Scary Skeletons" is going to be considered odd at best.

Going to start off by saying that this is more or less me explaining where I come from and what I think would and has made PASBL fun, I am neither stupid enough to think the bellow would be good or balanced it's just an emphasis of how I view and enjoy PASBL more or less. Also I'm gonna shamelessly copy Snorby's format.

I'm of the belief that TLs in their current form are far to restrictive and inherently flawed in that people are going to have their favorite pokemon and it arguably degrades their ability to enjoy the game if a significant portion of the pokemon they love are locked behind heavy prerequisites.

Suggestion, do away with prereqs, if Johny Joe Noob wants his favorite mon Ninetales he should be able to access to it, a game is for fun let the lad have fun. Now I recognize just letting everyone that walks through the door run around with a Snorlax would probably trigger a number of people here but a somewhat popular idea that's floated around on the Discord has been having something of a points system where a Trainer has X amount of points and the point cost of their complete squad can not exceed that number of points.

Given proper balance this would allow everyone to have some of their favorites while still making sure a fresh of the boat player can't just line their squad with top of the line pokemon and even gives a trade off if they try to do so in part.

As I alluded to earlier I don't like TLs as a concept and think we should just ax them. Instead of using them I simply suggest that the system I mentioned in the above section have things set up to where battling and perhaps reffing can help increase the points one can have for the purpose of pokemon additions and evolutions.

Lets have the points be our current TP, given at the end of each match regardless of win or loss so people don't get into ruts and lose motivation. Maybe let people buy decent amounts of TP with their SP? Regardless that's something I'll go into more in a later section.

I'm sure most of those that have been around me know I'm not a fan of direction we've taken with them. Throughout most of my time here sigs have been a way for Trainers to express their creativity, create unique tools, expand on the minor bits of RP that exist here and just in general have fun.

As I hope I've gotten across in my first section I want people to be able to use their favorite pokemon regardless of where they're at and part of this is being able to excuse using them once they actually get them, to make it short I want people to be able to sig their Eevee to be as good as Snorlax albeit in its own way. Why must some pokemon be blatantly better than others when one of the major strengths of PASBL is the freedom from moveset restriction and stat totals the game provides?

As a note for the above, perhaps have sigs on a pokemon contribute to its cost to a team, that way an Eevee as strong as a Snorlax still takes up as many of your options as an actual Snorlax.

Honestly fine with how it works right now for the most part, I do think the conversion to TP should be greater than it is though. I'd also suggest good behavior as a battler be rewarded somewhat with some SP or SP gain boosts.

Just keep them the way they are now but do evaluations more often and perhaps open a court similar to the old Sig Court where people can submit matches where refs are being shitty for more immediate and personal punishment. Could also use such a court to give people better grades!

Take control out of the involved parties hands, make them fully automatic and shut down attempts to ignore the rule. Limit TAs to have a short cool down between instances where they are established and put a limit to how long they can go on for. We don't want to excuse people going away for months and we don't want to let them do it by chaining close proximity TAs.

Do them more often, make them kind of radiate instead of going forward, by this I mean allow refs that just finished shit up right before them to recieve retroactive benefit from SP modifiers. Alternatively or additionally maybe just auto grant the event token to those who have done X amount of reffings within a time span.

Give us a social media presence already, see if anyone in the community is willing to upkeep and do the right kinds of spam, hell maybe decide on a list of people to do it so no one person gets overwhelmed.

I believe in a PASBL where anyone can use anything, both in acquisition and in actual practical in battle use regardless of how long they've been here or what they end up facing. I believe this can be achieved with a points based rework of our acquisition system and a do away with TLs as well as laxer sig rules. Let's make the highest denominator of pokemon the balance point instead of the middle ground, nothing can be overpowered if everything is.

The inner workings of PASBL need to be able to run smoother, let the best of us help lessen the burdens of the LOs by taking care of mundane things like HPs, Items and other stuff just needs a green stamp (sigs aside of course). More events, make it easier for our active refs to benefit from them.

Reward battlers for good behavior and be unforgiving to those that exhibit bad ones by having an extremely strict DQ system.

Make ASB more about fun than anything else, no point in a fine tuned machine if no one wants to use it.

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